Surfers to Earn $11,000 a Week Under New Surfing Super League’s Fixed-Pay Model

"Surfers hate change, a lot of them are stuck, so they’re going to hate it. Bring on the haters."

The slickly handsome former CEO of Surfing Australia, Chris Mater, a giant with the shoulders of a man who makes love a lot and with a charming little snub nose, has come out swinging after he announced a made-for-surfing TV League that’s gonna pay every competitor, all forty-eight of em, eleven gees a week for the duration of its eight-week season.

“The league is going to be quite polarising, people are going to love it or hate it. This is because surfers hate change, a lot of them are stuck, so they’re going to hate it. Bring on the haters,” Mater told B&T.

Mater’s bet is that controversy is a feature not a risk. The Surfing Super League, debuting in the 2028 southern summer, will field eight regional franchises across eight consecutive weekends on Australia’s East Coast, with 15 matches locked to a 90 minutes apiece, four surfers a side, relay-style, building to what the organisers call a “Power Surfer” climax.

Seven rounds decide a top four bound for a grand final, with fixed broadcast windows of four to six on Saturdays and Sundays, thirty hours of guaranteed live programming, conditions be damned. There’ll be stadiums with ticketed seating, live music, plus other sports like volleyball and, ah, pickleball.

Contracted surfers will be paid a fixed $89,000 for the eight-week season, $11,000 a week, a figure the league is already using to draw a contrast with the boom-and-bust reality of the existing world tour, where only a handful of surfers earn a stable living and the rest can go to hell.

Pay is equal for men and the gals, and every squad must run a co-ed grassroots pathway of three boys and three girls.

Mater, who spent almost twenty years at Red Bull, worked with him on one event and, oweee, he good at making things happen, built the case for the league on a gap between surfing’s popularity and its balance sheet.

Australia counts 6.3 million active surfers and 7.3 million fans, and recreational surfing contributes an estimated $2.71 billion annually to the economy, according to Australian National University research the league cites. Yet surfing captures a fraction of the sponsorship and broadcast money that flows to the National Rugby League or the Big Bash cricket competition.

David Ellsworth, a former senior vice president of creative strategy at Coca-Cola Japan, is the league’s lead investor. Organisers say they are in final talks with broadcasters for free-to-air and pay-television distribution, and are courting a founding principal partner and five major sponsors in banking, airlines and insurance.

Inevitably, the venture invites comparison to LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed circuit that fractured professional golf by rewriting its rules and poaching its stars.

Mater has not run from that parallel so much as claimed it as strategy: better to be loved and loathed in equal measure, his framing suggests, than to be ignored. “

The world’s biggest sports all share one thing in common,” he said. “They are built for live television.”

Owen Wright is even coming out of retirement to claim his eleven gees a week.

You like the sound of the SSL or hard no?